Thursday, February 26, 2015

This morning's New York Times reports that Republican candidates, with the sole exception of Ron Paul, are becoming more militant on foreign policy, and that several of them are arguing that we must meet ISIS in Iraq and Syria with ground forces. Among other things, they apparently see this as an effective way to attack Hillary Clinton, whom they will blame for going along with President Obama and ignoring the threat of Islamic radicalism during his first term and pulling out of Iraq too quickly. Already, of course, President Obama has committed himself to the "disruption" and eventual destruction of ISIS. This marks a profound step down the road to a new hell, involving an almost unbelievable ignorance of recent history. History is littered with such catastrophes, but I am very sad that I will apparently have to live through yet another during the last decade of my life.

What makes addictive policies self-destructive is that they are based on self-fulfilling prophecies: they bring about, or increase, the evils that they are supposed to combat. I first discovered this pattern writing my dissertation, which became the book, Economic Diplomacy and the Origins of the Second World War. (It is the only one of my books, at right, not still in print, but Princeton University Press is going to make an e-book available some time this year.) Hitler based his plans for expansion on the idea that Germany could not afford to depend upon world trade and needed the territory necessary feed itself. As soon as he took power, he began rearming to prepare the conquer the territory he thought Germany needed in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Rearmament took resources away from export industries and increased demands for imports--making it that much harder for Germany to meet its needs through world trade. That is why Goebbels, in 1935, had to announce that "we can do without butter, but we must have guns"--because there was no butter to be had in German groceries, since there was no foreign currency to import it. As I showed, the Germans found quick fixes in the late 1930s by trading grain imports from Eastern European states for arms, but their problems were compounded by 1939 by acute shortages of labor. When the war began they immediately put Polish and then French prisoners to work, and made enormous use of forced labor throughout the war. They still however had no chance in their war with three powers with vastly superior resources: Britain, the USSR, and the United States. In the postwar period the Germans have learned their lesson and depend proudly on their extraordinary skill at manufacturing industrial exports.

The US's disastrous addiction began, of course, with 9/11. President Bush immediately announced that this proved that terrorists all over the world threatened the United States, and that they, and any governments that sponsored them, had to be eliminated. As a matter of fact, the 9/11 Commission report showed how hard it was for Al Queda to get the necessary personnel (only 20 men) into the US to perpetrate that attack in in a relatively relaxed security climate, and it is really no surprise that no one has ever managed to pull off anything remotely similar again. In the United States, in Britain, and in France, a tiny number of local Muslim terrorists have managed to pull off a few outrages, but that is all, and frankly, it is unrealistic to think that we can stamp those out. Bush decided, of course, to overthrow the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq, confident that he could replace them with pro-American democracies that would deal with any terrorist threat. That was the disastrous mistake that we shall apparently be living with for much of the 21st century.

The intervention in Afghanistan initially drove the Taliban out of power, but they have grown much stronger since both inside of Afghanistan and, more critically, within Pakistan. The case of Iraq is much worse. There were no Al Queda terrorists in Iraq in 2003. Saddam Hussein would never have allowed them to operate. But when Saddam was overthrown and the US helped create a new, Shi'ite dominated government, a new Al Queda in Iraq took root among the Sunni population. General Petraeus's surge and the opening up of good relationships with Sunni tribal leaders quieted things down late in the last decade, but as excellent reporting by Dexter Filkins in The New Yorker has shown, the Shi'ite government threw those gains away within a few years by repressing the Sunnis. Thus, last year, they welcomed ISIS into their territory--and ISIS is a direct descendant of Al Queda in Iraq. Meanwhile, the United States responded to the Sunni revolt against President Assad in Syria by demanding that he step down, rather than working for some kind of settlement. ISIS has become the strongest force within the Sunni rebels as well.

Last year, ISIS decided to behead several American captives that the US government had (rightly) refused to ransom on camera. That vaulted them to the foreground of our radar screen, and President Obama declared all-out war on them. It seems incredible to me that no one seems to understand that this is exactly what ISIS wanted: to be seen as the spearpoint of Islam, particularly Sunni Islam, in the struggle against the United States in the Middle East. It would have made far more sense to make one retaliatory strike, and to advise all Americans, in the strongest terms, to stay out of war zones in Syria and Iraq to avoid being kidnapped and murdered. (Such a declaration is obviously a logical corollary to the no-ransom policy, with which, once again, I agree.) Now we are trying to do in Iraq what we tried to do in Vietnam in 1962-4 and 1972-3: to use air power to buck up allied Iraqi forces in an attempt to retake the territory that has been lost. The problem, of course, is that those forces are Shi'ite forces who are very likely to commit atrocities and alienate the population once again if they do retake Mosul and other territories. Meanwhile, ISIS is getting stronger in Libya and even in the Sinai peninsula and on the Egyptian side of the Libyan border.

The leaders and the people of the Middle East must solve the problems of the Middle East. The process will be long and very bloody, and their solutions may not reflect western values. But there is no evidence that the United States can do anything but make things worse by intervening militarily. At home, a new war will escalate the federal deficit once again. Because the economy is now improving, it may well create pressure for a draft, since it will be very difficult to refill the ranks of infantry and armor units with new enlistees. It will divert attention from increasingly serious problems in Europe. And worst of all--if recent history is any guide, and I believe it is--it will create more chaos.

We are on this path, as I have said here again and again, because both Republican and Democratic foreign policy specialists have a neo-Hegelian world view and assume that American values are destined to prevail. Our higher education system, increasingly intolerant of any views other than its own, contributes to this as well. Politically Republicans once again see a muscular foreign policy as an asset. And the pro-Israeli lobby is delighted to have gotten America into an even larger endless war than the one Israel is fighting, since it inevitably relieves such pressure as still remains upon the Israeli government to make peace. The Republicans will also probably line up against any nuclear deal with Iran, setting the stage for a confrontation with Iran if a Republican President is elected. Jon Stewart, in his inimitable way, addresses the problem of repeating one's self beginning at about the 8 minute mark of this clip.

We are dealing today with chaos in regions that western powers ruled only very briefly, if at all. The British and French mandates in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Palestine lasted only a few decades. The Ottoman Empire, which ruled them effectively for centuries, is not about to be reconstituted, and a renewed western imperialism to secure and administer these areas is simply out of the question, not least because their population has grown so much. A coalition of Sunni and Shi'ite governments could, one hopes, defeat ISIS, although the process would be a brutal one. Yet it is not clear that critical governments such as the Turks and the Saudis want ISIS destroyed--at least not yet.

I have no idea where, and how, all this will end. I do not believe in the possibility of a good outcome. I know that some others hold these views, but there does not seem to be much that we can do. Nor, sadly, does there seem to be any real statesmanship within the Arab world prepared to cope with what it faces.

Friday, February 20, 2015

Reading last Sunday's New York Times, I noticed an announcement in the magazine of a new format, and that set me thinking about long-term changes in that venerable newspaper and how they reflected changes in our society as a whole. I decided to compare two Sunday editions: February 17, 1965--half a century ago--and February 15, 2015. I picked two weekly sections to compare: the magazine, where I had started, and the Sunday Review, formerly the News of the Week in Review. The results more than justified my expectations--and here they are.

The very first story in the magazine for February 17, 1965 was in the long run probably the most important: "The Berkeley Affair: Mr. Kerr vs Mr. Savio & Co." It was a long survey of the student rebellion that had begun at Berkeley in the preceding fall, led by Mario Savio, a young New Yorker and veteran of the Mississippi Summer, on the issue of the right of students to conduct political activities on campus.

The next story is historical: "A Japanese Remembers Iwo Jima," a battle well within the memory of any New York Times reader of 30 or older--the audience the Times was trying to reach. Then comes a piece from London, "Could Maudling Win for the Tories?" Harold Wilson's Labour Government had come into power a few months earlier by winning an election by the very narrowest of margins. Reginald Maudling was not the leader of the opposition Tory party: he was one of the two contenders to replace Sir Alec Douglas-Home, whom Wilson had edged out, and who was now stepping down. As it turned out, Maudling lost the leadership election to Edward Heath. The intraparty battles of opposition parties in Europe are no longer newsworthy in major American newspapers, unless, of course, some kind of sex scandal is involved.

The next piece is a kind of prescient counterpart to the Berkley one: "We are in Too Deep in Asia and Africa," by Senator Frank Church. This was, as we shall see in a moment, the week that the bombing or North Vietnam got started in earnest, and we easily forget that a substantial cohort of major political figures, including Senate Majority leader Mike Mansfield and Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman J. William Fulbright, opposed the war from the beginning, as did Church. Nowadays no major political figure in Washington is standing against the Administration's Middle Eastern adventures. Of course, this was only the beginning.

Russell Baker was the Times's resident humorist, a place that has been vacant for some time, and he contributed a mildly entertaining page on living in Washington, D.C., emphasizing how relatively simple and easy life was there, compared to New York or San Francisco. I too remember that well, and it is interesting that Washington remained so small just as the Great Society was being put into place. Ronnie Dugger, a distinguished Texas journalist, then added an article about two reporters from Moscow who reached his home in Austin, Texas, while covering President Johnson.

Summing up, the New York TimesMagazine in 1965 was a place for long news feature stories, as well as long opinion pieces by politicians and opinion leaders. It assumed that its readers wanted new insights about world events, and tried to provide them. It also provided a few puzzles for entertainment, including the famous Sunday crossword, which of course survives today.

This last Sunday's magazine has a similar format--although it is
much shorter and has far, far fewer ads--but the subject matter of most
of its articles is quite different. It leads with "Feed Frenzy," an
account of how people have unwittingly ruined their lives with
indiscreet or somewhat offensive posts on social media that went
viral--truly a story for the age that we live in. The second story, a
very long one, deals with the relationship between a female Stanford
undergraduate and a local businessman in his late twenties--single--who
was designated as her mentor in a program linking the campus with local
businesses. They had an affair, which has degenerated into accusations
of sexual assault and rape, and the piece draws on numerous emails
between the two of them, between the woman and her best friend, and
between the best friend and the woman's mother. Such stories,
obviously, did not find their way into major newspapers in 1965. The
third article would have been at home in the magazine 50 years
ago--it deals with the attempt to hold Hezbollah accountable for the
assassination of the former Prime Minister of Lebanon in 2005. Then, on
the next page, we find, "Fear of Flying: What our Paranoia about Drones
tell us;" a piece by "the ethicist" on the very complicated roommate
policies of a college; a brief interview with David Axelrod regarding
his new book on his life in politics; and a science piece on how
atmospheric microorganisms may affect the weather. There's also a piece
about measurements in recipes, and a piece by Calvin Trillin, who is
apparently in his late seventies, about haircuts in the 1950s,
culminating in a revelation that his local barber habitually copped a
feel of his customers genitals when he finished the haircut.

The change in the magazine's subject matter seems to me quite simple. The main subject in 1965 was world politics, not surprisingly, given the astonishing events--both tragic and heroic--that had taken place during the previous half-century. The subject matter today, for the most part, is thereadership that the Times is trying to attract--well educated young adults. The articles focus on their lives, their problems, and their interactions with one another. And all that began, in my opinion, in the Berkeley rebellion that was the subject of the main story on February 17, 1965.I shall return to this later.

The second subject I looked at was The News of the Week in Review--now,
significantly, the Sunday Review. It was very long in those days, and
it is no exaggeration to describe it as a third news magazine,
comparable to Time and Newsweek, but without the
entertainment sections. The first two full pages were exactly what the
section's title promised, a summary of the major national and world news
stories of the week. Most of the first page is about the widening war in Vietnam--a day-by-day review of events of the past week. . The rest of it deals with the United States' balance of payments problems--it was very recent that our imports had begun to exceed our exports, and the US government was still committed to maintaining the dollar at a fixed value in terms of gold. The next page carrries an item about changes in the State Department, where Averell Harriman had been relieved as Undersecretary for Political Affairs. Then comes an account of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s campaign for voting rights in Selma and King's meeting with Johnson, who promised voting rights legislation. (Bloody Sunday in Selma was another three weeks away, but coverage of the campaign was already intense.) Then came a long story about the election of the President of the United Steelworkers union, in which half a million members had defeated the incumbent, David J. MacDonald, with I. W. Abel. Another piece about a longshoreman's strike involving 60,000 workers. Organized labor had been a tremendous economic and political power for thirty years now, and the subject of continuous coverage.

The World , the next subhead.begins with a story about Egypt and Israel: "A cardinal aim of United State policy in the middle East has been to maintain the balance of arab-Israeli military stgrength in that intermittently troubled area of the world." (Times do indeed change!) Then follow stories on government cutbacks in the aircraft industry in Britain; riots in India about the use of Hindi throughout the country; and a UK ban on TV cigarette advertising, which says a similar ban in the US is not likely. (It came about six years later.) The New York Section begins with a story about a fatal air crash off Long Island, followed by a story about the new NY Senator, Robert F. Kennedy, becoming involved in a fight to determine the new legislative leadership.

The next page is taken up entirely with two articles on the foreign policy of Communist China, with particular focus on the Vietnam War and Chinese-Russian relations. 2/3 of the next page is a more extended discussion of Johnson's attack on the balance of Ppayments problem; the other third is about Harold Wilson's slim majority in London. Then comes most of a page on voting rights campaigns in the Deep South, with the other 1/3 devoted to a regular feature, "The News of the Week in Law." The following page features the News of the Week in Science, with items on measles vaccines and changing rabies treatments. And then came the News of the Week in Education.

On the op-ed page, James Reston leads with a piece on Vietnam, "The Undeclared and Unexplained War." C. L. Sulzberger follows with a column on France, West Germany, and European unity, and Russell Baker, citing stories of increased teacher assaults in NY schools and marijuana at Harvard, talks prophetically about the threats posed by the Boom generation, which he does not specifically identify, who are tasting too many of life's pleasures too fast. A page later Arthur Krock weighs in with another Vietnam column, and there is a sampler of editorial opinion from around the world. On p. 10 we have "Report from the Nation," with stories from Tennessee, Houston, California, Detroit, and Atlanta. And that's that.

The News of the Week in Review is now the Sunday Review, and it is even more unrecognizable than the magazine. It does not include, much less begin with, a summary of the week's news. Instead, the two articles on the front page deal, respectively, with the impact even of hiking through the wilderness on the environment, and the second, with the impact of "faceless" abuse on the internet. The story taking up half of page 2 is about what readers' online comments on news stories signify--a telling counterpart to the summary of recent news stories one found there fifty years ago. The opinion section begins on p. 3 with a harrowing guest contribution, "Did a Text Kill My Brother?", about a fatal auto accident apparently caused by the other driver's lapse of attention. Then regular op-ed columnist Frank Bruni has a column, "Too Much Prayer in Politics"--a sentiment with which I certainly agree, but which does not address contemporary news events. An op-chart on p. 4 analyzes nine particular egregious misstatements of fact by various politicians. Below that is an article about vaginal reconstruction, the latest procedure women are being encouraged to undergo to make themselves more attractive. (Contemporary feminists might ponder whether such a story represents progress for women over the last half century--and why or why not.) Then the author Susan Jacoby contribued a long piece on the massacres of Jews during the first Crusade in Europe (there is nothing in the Sunday review about the massacres going on in various parts of the world right now), and another guest contributor argues that "Vitamins Hide the Low Quality of Our Food." On p. 6, there's an autobiographical piece about writer's block. Page 8 features a man-to-man letter, "To a Friend, On His Divorce." On p. 9 we find a feature by a beekeeper about beekeeping.

The op-ed page features three regulars: Maureen Dowd, who wrote about David Brock and infighting among Hillary Clinton's campaign team; Nicholas Kristof, with a typical piece about "Unpaid, Unarmed Lifesavers in Syria;" and Ross Douthat, about the film Fifty Shades of Grey. (Full disclosure: I saw it myself last night and while no masterpiece, it was much better than expected and featured a brilliant performance by Dakota Johnson.) The back page summarizes a study showing that even those who should no better accept misstatements of facts in movies as the truth, and an article about how a boy with a troubled childhood (the author) found refuge in skateboarding.

Now battles were building up in the Congress during the preceding week over immigration, and the Republicans seemed likely to shut down the Department of Homeland Security. An actual war between sovereign nations (albeit fought in part by proxy) is happening on the Russian-Ukrainian border, and a new revolutionary movement, ISIS, has seized substantial portions of Syria and the Middle East. A change of government in Greece has re-ignited the Greek debt crisis. Fifty years ago the French and German governments' discussions on European unity figured in the News of the Week in Review; this year the Sunday Review ignores those same governments' attempts to arrange a cease-fire in Ukraine. And so on. It was no accident, obviously, that the word "news" was dropped from the title of the Sunday review. My wife recently heard an interview with the administrator of a website, who referred to hard news as the "vegetables" of the information menu nowadays, the thing people didn't really want to eat, but thought they had to. I suspect that the MBAs who now run the world have convinced the Times management of something similar.

I chose this date almost randomly, but incredibly and coincidentally, the Times magazine of half a century ago documented the beginnings of the changes that would lead us to where we are. They can be found in A. H. Raskin's remarkable piece about the Berkeley student revolt, from which I cannot resist quoting some passages.

"The Berkeley mutineers did not seem political In the sense of those student rebels in the turbulent Thirties; they are too suspicious of all adult institutions to embrace wholeheartedly even those ideologies with a stake in smashing the system. An anarchist or LW.W. strain seems as pronounced as any Marxist doctrne. . .

"The proudly immoderate zealots of the F.S.M. [Free Speech Movement] pursue an activist creed -that only commitment can strip life of its emptiness, its absence of mean­ing in a great "knowledge factory" like Berkeley. That is the explanation for their conviction that the methods of civil disobedience, in violation of law, are as appropriate in the civilized atmosphere of the campus as they are in the primordial jungle of Mississippi. It was an imaginative strategy that led to an unimaginable chain of events.

"The cutoff in political re­cruitment [this refers to the ban on recruiting tables for local political action that triggered the first demonstrations] confirmed a convic­tion already held by some of the students that bankers, in­dustrialists, publishers and other leaders of the Establish­ment in the Board of Regents were making a concentration camp out of the the "multi­versity''--a term coined by [Berkeley Chancellor Clark] Kerr in a series of .lectmes at Harvard nearly two years ago to describe the transformation of a modem university, like Cal, into a vast techno­-educational complex.
This conviction was not di­minished by the extreme free­dom the university has long allowed
students to express their own political views. how­ ever unorthodox, at "Hyde Park" areas
inside the cam pus. Even during the ban on the use of campus property for organizing off-campus po­litical action, students re­tained their hberty to invite Communists, Nazis or Black Muslims to address meetings at the university. They also could-and often did-agitate for the right to smoke mari­ juana, to be able to buy con­traceptives at the University Bookstore or for other far-out [sic] objectives.

"If Clark Kerr is the high priest of the multi­ versity, social ·critic Paul Goodman is its Amtichrist and thus beloved of the F.S.M. The opening theme of an F.S.H. pamphlet is a declaration by Goodman that in the United States today, 'students-mid­ dle--class youth-are the major exploited class. • • • They have no choice but to go to college.' Rejecting their role as factory workers on an academic assembly line. the F.S.M. demands a humanized campus. a 'loving community' based on comradeship and purpose. 'We must now begin the demand of the right to know; to know the realities of the present world - in- revolution, and to have an opportunity to think cleariy in an extended manner about the world," says the F.S.M. credo. It is ours to demand meaning; we must insist upon meaning!'

Towards the end of his piece, Raskin questioned how far the protest could go:

"And who is listening, now that the clear-cut issue created by the closing of the Bancroft Strip and the blackout of po­ litical recruiting has been re­solved? The signs are that the overwhelming support for F.S.M. aims among students of all political hues and of no hues has evaporated along with the issue."

"One of the imponderables in trying to guess whether peace ha.s really come to the campus Is that some F.S.M. activists obviously have devel­oped a vested interest in find­ ing things to fight about. They seem to operate on the theory that, in a. system they believe Is basically corrupt, the worse things get, the easier it will be to generate mass resistance."

"The reckless prodigality with which the F.S.M:. uses the weapon of civil diSobedience raises problems no university can deal with adequately. Harsh discipline carries the danger of martyrdom and a spread of sympathetic disorders to other campuses."

The events that would trigger the further spread of civil disobedience, disciplinary reaction and protest were the subject not only of Frank Church's article in the same magazine, but of the lead paragraphs of the News of the Week in Review: the beginnings of the escalation of the Vietnam War. Thus did the older generation confirm the worst fears and anxieties of their children, eventually convincing them that yes, meaning could be found only in their own thoughts and feelings, and not in the political, intellectual or journalistic legacy of the past. That generation has been in charge for about 25 years now, and the results are all around us.

Let us be fair: the front page (although now only six columns instead of eight) and the front section of the Times today is relatively similar to that of fifty years ago. It is for those that I get home delivery every day and plan to do so until either I or the paper Times finally expires. But in a failing effort to attract new generations of readers, the Times, it seems to me, has abandoned most of its educational role. Both the magazine and the Sunday Review are about the readers they want to attract--their lives, their fashions, their hopes. The readers of 1965 seemed to understand, bless their hearts, that their private lives were their own business. But the Berkeley undergraduates wanted the wider world to take their thoughts and feelings more seriously. No one in 1965 could possibly have imagined the scale of their eventual triumph.

Saturday, February 14, 2015

Last week, on her way to Minsk with her ally Francois Hollande to reach a new cease-fire accord involving Russia and Ukraine, Angela Merkel made a rather striking statement about the past and the future. Citing the difficulty of resolving the situation satisfactorily, she remarked that she was a small child when the Berlin Wall went up, and that it took about three decades for it to come down. Similar patience, she implied, was needed to deal with Putin's ambitions and this crisis. I am afraid that Chancellor Merkel does not understand the age in which she is living and the differences between our world today and the one in which she, and I, grew up. Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, understands it very well.

The Berlin Wall was not a turning point in the Cold War in Europe; indeed, it could not fairly be described as an offensive measure undertaken by the Soviet Union. When the US, Britain and the USSR drew up their occupation plans for Germany in the last year of the Second World War, they split the country into three (later four) zones of roughly equal size and population, but decided to put their headquarters in Berlin, well within the Soviet zone. (At least one American planner realized that this decision might cause problems and suggested putting the headquarters at the intersection of the three zones, but he was one of those singularly brilliant people to whom no one listens until it is too late.) That meant that the American, British and French garrisons in Berlin were stranded within Soviet-occupied territory. After 1949 they were stranded within the German Democratic Republic, which the western powers refused to recognize in deference to the government of the Federal Republic of Germany. Even before then, in 1948, the Soviets had taken advantage of the situation to cut off land access to West Berlin. The allies responded with an airlift and Stalin lifted the blockade after about a year. The blockade was an offensive measure that had failed.

The Berlin crisis reached its peak in 1958-61, when Soviet premier Khrushchev--the most adventurous Soviet foreign policy leader ever--repeatedly threatened to sign a peace treaty with East Germany and turn the control of access of Berlin over to the East Germans. If they denied access and the West tried to force its way through, general war would result. This was the prospect Khrushchev threatened John Kennedy with in Vienna in 1961. But meanwhile, the Berlin situation had created crisis for East Germany. Because Germans could move freely through all of Berlin--even using the subway--East Germans could escape to the West at will. The flow of refugees became a flood in the summer of 1961 and the East German leader, Walter Ulbricht, insisted that it must stop. According to summaries of recent scholarly studies (which I have not read in their entirety), the wall was Ulbricht's idea, not Khrushchev's. It did not change West Berlin's status, although it encircled West Berlin--it merely made it impossible for East Germans (like Merkel's family) to cross into West Germany. (I have no idea whether Merkel's family had entertained such ideas.)

In any event, by 1961, the situation in Europe had been stable for some time. NATO and the Warsaw Pact had both been formed and their armies faced one another along West Germany's borders. Thousands of American nuclear weapons were stockpiled in Europe to fight a war with the USSR, should one begin. Communist governments controlled all Eastern Europe, and revolts in East Germany (1953), Poland (1956) and Hungary (1956) had been crushed. Political means had kept Communist parties out of governments in the West since 1947. A decade after the Wall went up, Chancellor Willy Brandt, one of the forgotten heroes of the twentieth century, began stabilizing the situation still further, recognizing Germany's postwar borders and opening relations with East Germany. The rest of the West followed suit in the Helsinki agreements of 1975. They officially accepted the division of Europe, and it was 14 years after that that the Wall came down.

The problem American policy makers have dealing with the situation that has emerged over the last 25 years is their Hegelian obsession with the idea that American values have triumphed, once and for all, and that anyone who stands in their way may be safely ignored. Thus, breaking promises that James Baker made to Mikhail Gorbachev, the US in the 1990s extended NATO eastward to Poland, the Czech Republic and the Baltic states, and eventually, to include all the former members o fthe Warsaw Pact. In 1999 the US led NATO in the war against Yugoslavia, detaching Kosovo, over Russian opposition. We assumed that Ukraine would follow the western model as well, but it failed to produce an effective democratic government.

What distinguishes Putin from his western adversaries is his recognition that American unipolarity has failed to bring about stability, and that his western borders include a number of weak stakes with immature political systems that are open to foreign influence and intimidation. Hungary now has a semi-Fascist government quite comparable to Putin's, and its leader has acknowledged his kinship with the Russian leader. The Russians exert considerable influence in Bulgaria. And now, having already annexed Crimea, they have used armed force effectively to detach eastern portions of Ukraine. Here an analogy with Hitler in 1938 is relevant: the British and French let Hitler have the Sudetenland, the largely German-inhabited portion of Czechoslovakia, at Munich, on the assumption that he would go no further. Six months later he broke up what remained of Czechoslovakia and occupied what is now the Czech Republic. Putin may simply want the rest of Ukraine to remain weak and chaotic, or he may want to turn it into a satellite like Belarus instead. In any case, the situation on Russia's western borders and in Eastern Europe as a whole has nothing in common with the situation in 1961. It is dynamic,. not static, and Putin is using the instability and weakness in the region to enhance his power.

I cannot help wondering whether the generation of Merkel and Hollande have gotten too accustomed to deferring to superpowers. The Europe of the EU would not have been possible without American protection and support. For 24 years now--really, since the first Gulf War--the Middle East has replaced Europe as the most important focus of American foreign policy, and a new power has emerged in Russia. I would be very interested to read the appreciations that are coming out of the French and German foreign offices these days, but the heads of government of those countries seem to be resigned to letting Putin have what he wants, at least in Ukraine. How they will feel if he tries to extend his sphere into some of the new NATO nations is not clear, although they have signed on to NATO's new rapid deployment force.

In times of strong governments and alliances, status quo powers can more easily make their will felt--and in Europe, both the US and the USSR were status quo powers for most of the Cold War. But in times of weak governments with less legitimacy, a disruptive regime has far greater opportunities. Putin understands this. He also understands that the United States was first off the mark using the instability of the post-Cold War period for its own purposes, expanding NATO, making war on Yugoslavia, and invading Iraq. As he repeatedly makes clear in speeches, two can play this game. So far, no Asian nation has decided to do the same. But the long-term future of Europe is once again in doubt.

Friday, February 13, 2015

Some months ago, a well-known publication commissioned this book review, and I immediately wrote it and turned it in. Unfortunately, while they never made any objection to it, they never found space for it either. Because I thought the book was an interesting one, I'm going to post the review here. A further post will appear tomorrow or Sunday, when we will be socked in with a blizzard yet again.

Matthew Moten, a retired Army
colonel and former head of the history department at West Point, has written a
wide-ranging, episodic account of American civil-military relations.Beginning in the Revolutionary War, his book
moves through the administration of John Adams, the War of 1812, the Mexican
War, the Civil War, the two world wars, Korea and Vietnam, and our two wars
with Iraq.The earlier chapters, for
which he relies largely on primary sources, will be the most educational for
most readers, and some of the later ones sometimes get bogged down in
narrative.

Moten gradually develops his own
model of civil-military relations. On
the one hand, the civilian authority—the President—needs to combine a clear
sense of what he intends to accomplish and a broad grasp of military
strategy.This is a very Clausewitzian
view, and one that remains very hard to argue with. On the other hand, the
military leadership needs professionalism, by which he means not only military
competence, but also a lack of political partisanship. And when it comes to military matters—at least
since the First World War—his default assumption is that senior military
officers understand what has to be done. The book’s selection of civil-military
conflicts and cooperation in every major war since the Revolution lays out a
somewhat depressing cycle of American civil-military relations.In his view, the necessary civilian and
military leadership was frequently lacking from the revolution through the
first two years of the civil war.Military professionalism developed quite slowly, and both Presidents and
generals often had their eyes fixed firmly on the next election. Lincoln and
Grant, Wilson and Pershing, and FDR and Marshall solved these problems and
achieved great things in the latter stages of the Civil War and the Second
World War.Moten thinks that things have
been going downhill ever since.

In the last 60 years, Moten argues,
American Presidents have relied upon politicized generals who would tell them
what they wanted to hear, rather than the professional military advice of the
Joint Chiefs as a whole.The facts, in
my view, sometimes have to be stretched to fit this argument. Thus, Moten
vastly exaggerates the role of General Maxwell Taylor in the Kennedy and
Johnson Administrations with respect to Vietnam and other matters.In his long discussion of the origins of the
Vietnam war, Moten never acknowledges that what the Joint Chiefs wanted was an
all-out war throughout Indochina, regardless of the very real risk of war with
Communist China—a strategy which Presidents were wise to reject. Since he cuts
his discussion of Vietnam off when American troops arrive in 1965, he does not
have to acknowledge that for the next two years, until 1967, President Johnson
did almost everything the Chiefs wanted.And indeed, at the end of his
Vietnam chapter, he reverses himself, arguing that the military and civilian leadership
had collaborated in leading the United States into a hopeless war.

Moten’s personal feelings intrude
more and more as the book continues.He
has considerable animus towards Colin Powell, whom he sees as an entirely
political animal who usurped civilian authority and made major mistakes during
the Gulf war.But he has far more
contempt for Donald Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks, the leading civilian
architect and military executor of the Iraq war of 2003, who refused to face up
to what the conflict would entail.He is
also highly critical of the increasing involvement of retired general officers
in electoral politics—a position with which I thoroughly agree.

There are in fact at least two
separate questions that have to be asked about civil-military relations in war.
The first, upon which Moten tries to focus, is whether political and military
leaders consulted appropriately and played their proper roles.The second, which in practice is just as
important, is whether either civilian or military leaders had feasible
political objectives on the one hand, and a good idea of the military
strategies that would achieve them on the other. Because Moten does not always
separate these questions clearly, he is often led into contradictory positions.
On the one hand, he realizes that General MacArthur’s call for a war with Red
China in 1951 contradicted Truman Administration policy and that therefore
MacArthur had to be relieved. On the other, he criticizes President Kennedy for cutting most
of the Joint Chiefs out of the White House meetings on the Cuban missile
crisis, even though their preferred course of action—an airstrike and invasion
of Cuba—would, we now know, have surely led to exactly the nuclear war Kennedy
was determined to prevent.Presidents
such as Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Kennedy, who are instinctively fine strategists
themselves, understand that the result is what counts, and that they cannot
always follow their generals’ and admirals’ recommendations and still achieve
it.

Because Moten does not treat all his wars
thoroughly and does not discuss some decisions not to go to war at all, he leaves out some of the greater success
stories in civil-military relations.Thus, after MacArthur’s relief, General Matthew Ridgway, who replaced
him, successfully concluded the Korean War within the constraints imposed upon
him by the Truman’s Administration’s policies because he both understood and
accepted them.In 1954 President
Eisenhower relied upon the advice of Ridgway, now Army Chief of Staff, to ward
off the pleas of Secretary of State Dulles and Vice President Nixon to go to
war in Indochina.History, I strongly
suspect, will eventually show that cautious military leaders kept the Reagan
Administration out of unwise adventures in the Middle East and Central
America.Moten notes, correctly, that
civil-military relations must be understood as an ongoing negotiation among
powerful men with different priorities.History shows however that the negotiation cannot possibly have a good
outcome if neither party has a sound idea of what it is possible to accomplish,
and how the objective might be gained.And sadly, this problem has not gone away.

Thursday, February 05, 2015

My normal schedule has been disrupted this week, partly because I'm going on a brief vacation tomorrow, and partly because Time wants to post my next effort there on Monday. (It will be linked here, of course.) Thus I have decided to repost one of my earliest efforts, from just a little more than ten years ago. I didn't have very many readers then--maybe a couple of hundred a week, as I recall--and I think that it has held up pretty well. So, here goes.

Thursday, October 21, 2004

President Bush likes to contrast himself and his policies with the
1960s. “We’re changing the culture of America,” he says, “from one
that says, ‘If it feels good, do it,’ and, ‘If you’ve got a problem,
blame somebody else,’ to a culture in which each of us understands we’re
responsible for the decisions we make,” (When Dick Cheney used the
language of the 1960s in the face of an opposition U.S. Senator and
defended himself because he “felt better,” the irony got less attention
than it deserved.) Culturally, of course, the President rejects the
sexual liberation of his youth, and portrays himself as a reformed
sinner. Politically, as a conservative, pro-war Republican whose father
had campaigned against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he was certainly
out of step on the Yale campus of 1964-68. All this is, however,
entirely misleading—and the country, particularly its younger voters,
should try to understand exactly who and what they are voting for before
the election. George Bush and his Administration actually represent
the worst of the late 1960s—a terrifying certainty determined to
repudiate the past, disrupt the present, and risk the future for an
ideological ideal. His certainty is not merely, as Ron Susskind argued
last in last Sunday's New York Times, a question of his faith—it is all too characteristic of his entire generation.

As George W. Bush’s college years drew to a close, the most visible
political faction on most campuses was the Students for a Democratic
Society, which took over the main Adminstration building, provoked a
police bust, and temporarily halted instruction at my own school,
Harvard, in the spring of 1969. They were distinguished more than
anything else by a complete rejection of everything our parents stood
for. In their eyes, the Cold War’s “defense of freedom” was greedy
imperialism; civil rights laws simply masked enduring American economic
racism; marriage and family were outdated bourgeois conventions; and
democracy was a sham. They and they alone knew good from evil, and
they had less than nothing to learn from the past. Even within their
own ranks, they had contempt for democratic processes. In April of that
memorable year, a vote of the SDS turned down a proposal to occupy
University Hall by a vote of about two to one—but the next day, the
losing minority faction undertook the occupation anyway, dragging their
colleagues (and eventually most of the student body) in their wake.

A similar omniscient spirit has dominated the Bush Administration
from the day it took office. One by one, the achievements of our
parents’ generation—who occupied the White House from John F. Kennedy
through George H. W. Bush—have been gleefully tossed aside: the ABM
Treaty, the rigid separation of Church and State, overtime protection
for workers, environmental protection, and especially the spirit of
compromise and civic responsibility that allowed Republicans and
Democrats to work together for the good of the country from the 1950s
through the 1980s. In foreign policy they have even repudiated, in
effect, the NATO Alliance and the United Nations. Events in the fall of
2002 were particularly revealing. Prodded by Colin Powell, who
remembers the 1950s, the Administration sought a second Security Council
resolution to authorize war against Iraq, but when they found they had
only two other votes on their side, they simply disregarded the opinion
of the world in the same way that the SDS disregarded the majority vote
the night before the occupation of University Hall. Meanwhile, our
Boomer-crafted new National Security Strategy gives the United States
both the right and the duty to decide what nations shall possess what
weapons, and summarily to remove hostile regimes. My Harvard classmate
Elliot Abrams opposed SDS’s attempt to rule Harvard University according
to their lights, but he is now enthusiastically doing his part to
assure that he and his Administration colleagues rule the whole world in
the same way.

Other memories from the Vietnam era come to me these days. One
Saturday afternoon in 1970, I sat in a packed Harvard Square theater
watching Sam Peckinpaugh’s The Wild Bunch. Midway through the movie,
William Holden (himself a member of what we now call “The Greatest
Generation”) tried to explain to his fellow gang members why Robert Ryan
was now working for the other side. “He gave his word,” Holden said,
speaking for an older America. “It’s not whether you keep your word!”
one of his companions shouted. “It’s who you give it to!” The audience
went crazy with delight. Isn’t that the same spirit in which the Bush
White House has patronized the scurrilous, baseless campaign of the
Swift Boat veterans? John Kerry is on the wrong side; therefore, he
can’t be a war hero. And such is the partisanship of our times that
even Bob Dole and George H. W. Bush Sr. have joined this
campaign—although John McCain, significantly, refuses to do so.

Reality, of course, is a casualty of classic Baby Boomer thought.
SDS members truly believed in 1969 that workers and students were going
to overturn the established order—because it was right. In the same
way, George W. Bush, in defiance of mountains of evidence that Iraq is
disintegrating and that our intervention has reduced our standing in the
Arab world to new lows, repeats that Iraq is on its way to a democratic
transformation that will spread through the region. Freedom, he
explains, is the Almighty’s gift to every man and woman on this
planet—an homily which leaves a calmer observer wondering why the
Almighty has been so stingy about bestowing it in so much of the world
for so many centuries, or whether the President believes that he is
fighting Satan’s evil presence on earth.

Caught between ideology and reality, the Administration constantly
resorts to Orwellian language. A loss of jobs becomes economic
progress, less health care means more, opening national forests to
logging becomes “The Healthy Forests Initiative,” and so on. In the
same way, the SDS explained to us that dictatorship of the proletariat
was the only true democracy. And the Administration cares nothing about
federalism, because federalism could stand in its way. In 1960, when
Kennedy and Nixon debated federal aid to education, Nixon argued that
federal money would eventually mean federal control. Now a new
Republican generation is using federal money to discredit and weaken
public education through the No Child Left Behind Act.

The Bush Administration and its supporters are usually less obvious
than their left wing contemporaries were about their repudiation of our
parents’ works, but the other day, Grover Norquist—the anti-tax activist
who has bragged about his close relations with the White House for four
years—let the cat out of the bag in an interview with a Spanish
newspaper. The Weekly Standard has printed quotes from the tape of the
interview. Here is now Norquist assessed the coming election.

"And we've had four more years pass where the age cohort that is
most Democratic and most pro-statist, are those people who turned 21
years of age between 1932 and 1952--Great Depression, New Deal, World
War II--Social Security, the draft--all that stuff. That age cohort is
now between the ages of 70 and 90 years old, and every year 2 million of
them die. So 8 million people from that age cohort have passed away
since the last election; that means, net, maybe 1 million Democrats have
disappeared…

"This is an age cohort that voted for a draft before the war started,
and allowed the draft to continue for 25 years after the war was over.
Their idea of the legitimate role of the state is radically different
than anything previous generations knew, or subsequent generations. . . .
Very un-American. Very unusual for America. The reaction to Great
Depression, World War II, and so on: Centralization--not as much
centralization as the rest of the world got, but much more than is usual
in America. We've spent a lot of time dismantling some of that and
moving away from that level of regimentation: getting rid of the draft ." . .

Norquist, a younger Baby Boomer, has actually hit the nail on the
head. The twenty million men we drafted to win the Second World War (a
conflict he apparently regrets) deserved, and got, their countrymen’s
reward, in the form of the GI bill, 4% mortgages, generous Social
Security benefits, and real pensions. Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman
and Dwight Eisenhower confirmed the government’s responsibility for
their well-being and that of their families. Such policies have now
become “un-American” as the Bush Administration leads us towards their
New Jerusalem—really a new Gilded Age. Norquist is actually exalting
the collapse of civic virtue and mutual responsibility that he has
helped to promote during his political career. Younger Americans should
understand one thing: our current leadership is impervious to facts.
Ultimately, like so many of my contemporaries, they care less about any
specific changes they make at home or abroad than about simply proving
to their own satisfaction that they are right and everyone else is
wrong. They have already left the nation and the world a dangerous
legacy.

About Me

Since 1976 I have been a historian of international and domestic politics, as well as an authority on some of the more famous criminal cases in American history. For the past eight years I have been using this space to comment on current events. Links to my books, including, The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy (2008), appear above, at the top right corner of this page.. Simply click to learn more about them or to order them.
The email circulating widely attributed to me comparing President Obama to Adolf Hitler is a forgery: see snopes.com/politics/soapbox/proportions.asp.
Comments are welcome, but comments that are both abusive and anonymous will be deleted.